When and where did humans evolve?

Palaeontology, archaeology and genetics confirm Darwin was right to identify sub-Saharan Africa as humankind’s area of origin. Hominins (the group of animals to which modern humans and our immediate extinct relatives and ancestors belong) split from the lineages leading to our closest relatives (chimpanzees and bonobos) 6-7 million years ago and are known from several places in South and East Africa. Our own genus, Homo, evolved – perhaps in East Africa – about 2.5 million years ago and was the first hominin to leave Africa. But the lineages that first did so are almost certainly evolutionary dead ends. DNA analyses of people alive today show beyond doubt that all modern humans have a much more recent African origin. Along with fossil finds, they indicate that our own species, Homo sapiens, evolved south of the Sahara about 200,000 years ago.

When did we move out of Africa?

The fossil record is clear that hominins moved out of Africa more than once, the first time about 1.8 million years ago. Those movements brought several species into Europe and Asia, including the ancestors of the Neanderthals and those of the ‘hobbits’ (Homo floresiensis) found a few years ago on the Indonesian island of Flores. However, modern humans spread beyond Africa much more recently than this. A first move, indicated by 100,000-year-old fossils from Israel, is often considered a failed colonisation, though new work by Oxford’s Mike Petraglia and others suggests that it could have reached as far as India. A further expansion some 60-70,000 years ago saw people cross the Red Sea into Arabia and move around the Indian Ocean rim from there.

Who were the Neanderthals and why aren’t they here today?

DNA analyses of Neanderthal bones show their ancestors split from ours about 600,000 years ago and that genetic drift and adaptation to the severe cold of repeated Ice Age conditions produced the distinctive skeletal characteristics known from fossils across much of Europe and western Asia. In general, Neanderthals seem to have been heavily carnivorous and they were clearly efficient hunters of medium and large game. However, archaeology suggests that they probably had more limited cognitive capacities than our own ancestors. In particular, there is next to no convincing evidence that Neanderthals made and used art, jewellery or complex tools of the kind associated with Homo sapiens. It seems likely that, socially and technologically, modern humans could cope better with severe fluctuations in climate and food availability, outliving, outbreeding and outcompeting Neanderthals across their range. The last known individuals died out in Spain about 28,000 years ago.

When did we first start producing art?

The cave paintings and decorated objects left by Upper Palaeolithic people in parts of Europe (especially southwest France and northern Spain) were long thought to place the answer to this question no more than 40,000 years ago. Now, shell bead jewellery from sites in Africa and Israel demonstrates that people have been using material culture to make statements about their identity for at least 100,000 years. Equally startling, geometric designs scratched into pieces of ochre go back to around 75,000 years ago at Blombos Cave, South Africa, and can be paralleled only a little later at other sites on ochre and on ostrich eggshell.

Are there any new discoveries?

Absolutely. Just in the past few months three big ones have occurred. First, the ancestors of the Flores ‘hobbits’ turn out to have got there, across the open sea, over one million years ago. Second, mitochondrial DNA analysis of a finger bone from a cave in Russia’s Altai Mountains shows its owner to belong to an evolutionary lineage that split about this same time from those leading to the Neanderthals and us. Not only does this mean there was a third (previously unknown) hominin species in Siberia as recently as 40,000 years ago, it points to a previously unsuspected migration out of Africa about 1.0 million years ago. And third, there are the two beautifully preserved partial skeletons of Australopithecus sediba from caves near Johannesburg, a new species perhaps directly ancestral to our own, from just under 2 million years ago. Human evolution continues to surprise.

Bar few, the eminent figures of the arts world over the past decades have had one thing in common: they’ve all been interviewed by Melvyn Bragg. It really wasn’t much of a surprise then when Bragg’s apology for keeping me waiting at his ITV office was because he’d been busy organising an interview with Victoria Wood.

The Cumbrian culture vulture is host and editor of TV’s longest-running arts programme, The South Bank Show, now in its final comeback series called Revisited. The programme has brought writers, actors, musicians, dancers, directors and artists into often surprisingly sincere close-up. He’s chatted to Laurence Olivier on his deathbed; he chased the French composer Olivier Messiaen for twenty years; and George Michael marked the occasion by lighting up an enormous spliff. In addition to the show’s unparalleled duration, Bragg can also claim credit for his role, as he puts it to me, “in tackling opera and pop music with equal seriousness”.

‘Oxford and the movies were where my whole life really started’

But above all there is his gift for disarming some of the trickiest and most fortified egos on the planet. Finding that parenthesis, getting that foot in the door to the mind of the interviewee must be a real challenge? “Yes. You’ve got to get it right. The point of entry; that’s the really the hard bit”. Most people, he tentatively explains, start out looking like they’re shot through with nerves, jittering apprehensively. “Not about me, or my questions”, he’s quick to add, “but because they’re on screen; it’s very different from the way you talk to your pals, or even the way you talk on radio. You know that your face is going to be in other people’s faces”. Bragg pauses. He seems slightly hesitant. “The way you look counts for a big percentage of the way people see you, and they know that.”

Even so, Bragg always seems to pull it off and lay bare the raw talent of creative minds. In the astonishing Francis Bacon interview, he and Bragg go out for lunch and get absolutely plastered on disgusting red wine. Bacon staggers to his feet, declares “Cheerio”, and fills their glasses again. Bragg asks: “Why do you want to do that, Francis?” The artist replies: “Because I like doing it. I just happen to be a painter, that’s all.” He then goes on to talk eloquently, if a little slurringly, about his work. “Francis drunk was a very important part of Francis”, Bragg said. “And when he was drunk he talked about his life to the highest level.”

Most famous of Bragg’s encounters was his interview with Dennis Potter in 1994 just before his death where he started with the question: “How did you, and when did you, find out that you’d got this cancer?” The interview rocketed round the world and people took to it because of the power of what Dennis said, and because of the way they did it: Bragg vividly describes the shabby, stripped down TV studio where Dennis was sipping liquid morphine, clasping a bottle of Champagne and heavily smoking.

Asking Potter about his cancer was a one off though. Bragg’s main focus has always been on the work of the artist, not on their personal life. It’s the quest to get to the heart of “what is real in the marrow of their work” that he sees as the definitive challenge. “Sometimes I get it and just feel rather quietly pleased with myself”.

He candidly admits that the personal does occasionally seep in, like when Bacon talked about his homosexuality. “But he brought that in”, Bragg assures me; “I didn’t sort of say are you gay or anything”.

I learn that keeping this sense of distance from people’s private goings on is a belief instilled in Bragg by his small town background – it’s something quite necessary in a tight-knit community, he points out. “You really mustn’t pry into the private lives of others”.

Part of this belief might also stem from the great personal tragedy he has had to come to terms with. His first wife, the French writer and artist Lisa Roche, committed suicide in 1971, a pain that he has said “never stops”. In 2008 he published the novel Remember Me… that addressed her death in fictional form. It took him almost five years to complete it, “rewriting and rewriting. I worked harder than I’ve ever worked at anything”.

It was Bragg’s 20th offering in a long pedigree of novels and it dug into the last part of the previous novel Crossing the Lines; the two form “the Oxford novel I refused to write”. But although part-fiction, the passages about Oxford had to be written. “They were where my whole life really started.”

So what’s the reality behind Bragg’s Oxonian turning point? “There were some crackingly good Historians to look up to”, he says. But it was the allure of the movies shown at the Phoenix Picture House in Jericho, then named The Scala, which really changed everything. “Something clicked. I saw that there was a different world out there.”

He explains how he became immersed in contemporary European film, enthusiastically reeling off an endless list of directors I’ve barely heard of. By his third year he’d moved a long way away from just wanting to pass exams. He was enjoying writing for Cherwell as film critic, acting, and had even tried his hand at writing short stories, “although I sure didn’t tell anybody”. He also loosely remembers co-directing a film at Oxford called Altogether Boys. I eagerly press him for a copy. “Mercifully none of us know where it is!”, Bragg responds.

He went on to win a traineeship with the BBC, “and that was probably the biggest stroke of luck in my life. In retrospect, I’m rather embarrassed to say, at the time, I hadn’t a clue what I wanted to do; I genuinely had not a clue”.

But Bragg moved up the ranks quickly. After a 10-year stint on Start the Week, which he turned into a Radio Four flagship, he launched In Our Time, with the county’s top boffins talking it out about anything from Platonic philosophy to the frontiers of contemporary physics. “In academia, a lot of it is taken for granted. My job is to say, hold on, I didn’t understand that Higgs boson”. He thought it would probably only last six months. Instead, it has become a benchmark of quality broadcasting and he tells me he’s just signed another three year contract. “I’m up at five am doing my final cramming session before I go in”, he tells me. “That really keeps you going”.

Now in his 70s, Bragg has more than a lifetime of experience to retell. But could he see himself being interviewed on The South Bank Show as the great populariser of the arts that he now is? “Oh no, wouldn’t dream of it.” As Bragg modestly puts it: “I’m not a very good interviewee actually”.

Having spent half a lifetime in political journalism, David Seymour has a thing or two to say to those that can’t be bothered with the ballot box. As we take a seat in a South Kensington cafe he tells it to me straight: ‘The thing is, I’m all in favour of cynicism in politics as long as it doesn’t extend to the BNP or not voting’.

His point is not to be taken lightly. Election turn-out since the end of the Second World War has plunged from 80% to 60% and is expected to fall even lower in the wake of the MP’s expenses scandal. This is especially the case with young people; the Electoral Commission has recently warned that over half of 17-25s eligible to vote are not registered to do so.

‘But just because many young people don’t seem interested in the election, that doesn’t mean they’re not political’. I’m with David on this, and point out that many under 25s are heavily involved with climate camps, Twitter storms, and ethical consumerism. ‘Yes. Really it’s the politicians that say you’re apathetic about politics’, he adds.

‘The problem is that there’s a disconnect between being passionate about certain issues and actually channelling this passion into support for political parties’. Co-authering a new book Why Vote? he wants to remedy this. But he doesn’t want to do it by painting a picture of how marvellous politicians are. No, before telling me why I should vote, he wants to make it clear that politics is blighted by a serious malaise.
Personality is first on the list of problems and Gordon Brown is certainly in David’s firing range. ‘Sure, people that do see a lot of him think he’s fantastic. But if you stick him in front of a television crew, he really doesn’t come across like that. I’ve found this with so many politicians.’

In October Brown was asked about his favourite biscuit during a live web chat with the parents’ website Mumsnet: he failed to answer. ‘You know, that’s a classic! If he does say ‘I like chocolate digestives’, does he think he’s going to be attacked by the BMA or suffer criticism by McVitties rivals?’ Leaning forward and tapping on the table to drive home his point, he says: ‘I mean what is the bloody issue? Biscuits will be sprinkled on his political grave, really’.

‘Young people have an idea that a lot of it is all bollocks’

Another problem is cowardice. ‘When they’re ministers they say they’ve got to criminalise more drugs, and do more CRB checks. But when they come out of the spotlight and sit down with a cup of tea, they have completely different ideas’.
There’s unpublished Home Office research, he assures me, that shows that the reason the number of burglaries has dropped suddenly isn’t because of intervention of the state with a tough law and order policy, but because the price of drugs collapsed with the invasion of Afghanistan. A side effect was to flood the market with drugs.
‘Tough policy isn’t what works in containing drugs, but they don’t want to be seen to acknowledge that. When will we ever hear a politician stand up and say “I know how to cut crime by 50% over night. The way to do it is to decriminalise drugs.” I’m not saying we should just do this. But if you’re arguing about crime, why has no politician got the balls to admit this?’

Seymour also thinks Parliament is a shambles. ‘MPs are used as lobby fodder to put through the next policy gimmick. The BBC’s The Thick of It is really it. That’s what’s actually happening inside. The House of Lords is actually far better than the House of Commons because most don’t give a toss about the whips or gimmicks.’

He hasn’t come to a conclusion about whether the character of politicians can change. But he does think that part of it is a reaction to the way the media operates now. ‘Politicians weren’t confronted with these things 40 years ago. There was no real direct challenging on TV. Now they are all the time and they just have to run the party line.’
There is a glimmer of hope, however. Seymour eagerly tells me that in this sea of political inanity, there are some that still keep politics afloat. His favourite is Ed Milliband. ‘Most politicians listen but respond with a stock politician answer. But Ed: you can challenge him on anything and he will have a debate about it; he really does it! That’s also why Cameron and Clegg are where they are. People realised they were actually good at having an open debate.’

‘To say you’re not going to vote is to let them get away with it’

But what about the rest? Can we intervene? ‘Yes! To say politicians aren’t doing anything for us, so we’re not going to vote, is to let them get away with it’. What’s more, and students should take note of to this, Seymour believes that ‘young people are in a better informed, more educated position to vote than ever before.’ This is partly because of the development of the internet and new media technologies. Sites such as Youth Net and Left Foot Forward provide a platform for young people to communicate about politics in a way they could never have done previously. He also suspects that young people are far less inclined to vote on the basis of celebrity or empty policy. ‘They have an idea that a lot of it is all bollocks’.

That’s all very well. But if you’ve got one vote, there’s not a lot you can do. ‘But the point is’, Seymour rebuts, ‘that you’re part of a bigger mass. Go out and get active!’

Hearing this, I feel a sense of urgency. Maybe, as a ‘young person’, I really am in a better position to avoid either naïve enthusiasm for voting as an end in itself, or cynical rejection of democracy as a meaningless charade. Sadly – and I’m sure most students (apathetic or not) can sympathise with this – buying a round in the pub that evening rather than purchasing a copy of Seymour’s new book Why Vote? got the better of me. Perhaps they stock it in the Bodleian.

Why Vote? A guide for those who can’t be bothered is by David Seymour and Jo Phillips. Published by Biteback.